Audio Draft

I actually do not have an audio draft at this time. This post is a placeholder, as i’ve had family problems spring up that have made my time for classwork in the last week very slim. I do have some ideas already, and have recorded sound (such as dogs barking at the shelter to add as a background sound.)

I plan to talk about adopting animals from shelters instead of going with pet store bred dogs, which probably come from accident breeding, or backyard breeders who don’t know what they are doing. I plan on using the dogs barking in the shelter in the background when talking about them being locked up there, waiting for a new home.

I’ll definitely have something done by the final, but I currently don’t have time to put out a draft to be talked about, and I doubt that you all would like to listen to a minute straight of dogs barking that I recorded on my phone, but i’ll upload it when I have the time to.

Logo Project Final

(Font is from http://typodermicfonts.com/foo/, used according to licensing agreement. Found on https://www.dafont.com/foo.font.)

For this topic, I decided to make a logo for a fake Animal Shelter that takes in any kind of animals, along with cross socializing animals when able to be done safely. This selection was to make it fit in well with my theme while still being different enough from other animal shelters that I know of the existence of.

I started off with making a couple small sketches of ideas, wanting to keep it simple without just copying the design ideas off of what we did the in tutorials.  While I didn’t really use anything we didn’t already do in the tutorials, I didn’t want to something that was directly based off of what was done in them, thus I decided to draft a logo somewhat like the Petco logo, where it has multiple animals (in this case, a cat, a dog, and a rat) cuddled up together. I’m not a great artist, so I tried my best to make them out of ellipses. I tried to make each animal visually contrasting through different heights, to make sure they weren’t blending into each other by not having enough difference between them. Essentially, I made it as simple as possible and just wanted to make sure everything looked different enough that you could distinctly tell what you were looking at.

In my draft I hadn’t added their tails, and originally had the text slightly behind the animals, not enough to make it in any way unreadable, but people seemed to not like it that way, which lead to me moving it out more to the side. Beyond that, not much has changed between the draft and the final, other than the addition of tails and a slight shift in the cat’s position. I didn’t end up changing their color like was also suggested, as I ended up not really liking any other color scheme than the one I had already picked.

Overall, I think my logo, like my graphic design project, didn’t need that much changed. I liked the text already, and didn’t need to do anything. I had no problems with the program, and managed to finish with no problems.

Logo Draft

(Font is from http://typodermicfonts.com/foo/, used according to licensing agreement. Found on https://www.dafont.com/foo.font.)

For this topic, I decided to make a logo for a fake Animal Shelter that takes in any kind of animals, along with cross socializing animals when able to be done safely. This fits in with my theme of animal rescue, and isn’t based off of any shelter that I currently know of.

I started off with making a couple small sketches of ideas, wanting to keep it simple without just copying the design ideas off of what we did the in tutorials.  While I didn’t really use anything we didn’t already do in the tutorials, I didn’t want to something that was directly based off of what was done in them, thus I decided to draft a logo somewhat like the Petco logo, where it has multiple animals (in this case, a cat, a dog, and a rat) cuddled up together. I’m not a great artist, so I tried my best to make them out of ellipses. I tried to make each animal visually contrasting through different heights, to make sure they weren’t blending into each other by not having enough difference between them. Essentially, I made it as simple as possible and just wanted to make sure everything looked different enough that you could distinctly tell what you were looking at. However, I haven’t managed to finish the logo as I would have liked. I didn’t have the time to figure out how to make the tails, and thus had to leave them out now for now. I couldn’t get them to look how I wanted, ending up looking very odd. I still need to work on it.

Overall, the only thing that I used outside of my own creation is the text, which is already linked to at the top of the page. It is free to use in logos, so I was alright in my use of it. It does not say you have to give credit, but credit is below the image.

Logo Draft Sketch

Sorry about the blur, my phone camera is very poor. My idea for the logo project is a logo for an animal shelter and/or animal rescue. I created the name Unlikely Friends with my wife. The logo is essentially a kitten, a small dog, and a rat cuddled up close to each other, implying friendship between them. The idea is that the shelter would focus on caring for animals and teaching animals to be friendly to many other kinds of animals, to broaden their appeal for potential adopters.

Graphic Design Project Final

As my overall theme for this class is “Animal Rescue”, I decided to base my graphic design project on making a poster encouraging people to go to their local animal shelter. I went with the general approach because I do not have permission to use any of the local or nearby animal shelter’s logos.

I started off by searching through royalty free/public domain animal pictures, with the vague idea of “Dog thinking about it’s life outside of the shelter”. All images were gathered from Pexels.com. I did do a small amount of searching for similar posters, but many of them were exactly the same, so I decided to do something a little different than most of the posters I saw and make it look dramatic, which was surprisingly only used by a few shelter ads.

I found my pictures and got to work. I started off with this picture as the base:

And then extended it from 750Hx1000L to 1000Hx1000L, thus giving me more area to work with. I filled in the new white space with black, and blended it into the picture so nobody could tell it was not always that long. Then I cut the image of the dog out, making small edits to it’s outline like removing whiskers. Then I edited the space left behind, blending in different shades of gray so that nobody could tell without looking really hard that the dog was removed from the background. After that, I messed with the dog’s hue and contrast, getting him to be a little more striking along with turning him grayscale. Then I loaded in my other pictures:

I placed these on layers behind the first dog. The general idea of these pictures is that the dog is imaging all the fun, great times it could be having if someone would just give it a chance. After stretching these images into sizes that were roughly the same, I placed them on the canvas in a way that I thought looked good. Each one of the images got tweaked in its contrast and its Hue/saturation, each receiving a clipping mask so that the other images were not affected. After that, I lowered the opacity and blurred the images with the blur tool, and the blur filter. Lastly, I added the text and placed it in the open spots.

After posting it on my blog, and waiting for feedback, I only received feedback from two classmates. Both of them seemed to miss the point of the image entirely, and didn’t really give any advice other than “Use other dogs/animals”, when the point of the image is that the dog is imagining the images behind him. I wrote this in my post, thus I think they probably didn’t read my post before commenting.

The changes I made to the image after the feedback aren’t too big. I added another line of text telling the reader to visit their local animal shelter, and messed with the opacity of the background images a little more to make them more faded out.

Above is the original image for comparison.

Lastly, I didn’t encounter any technical problems at all in my project, besides having to use an older version of photoshop that I already have owned for years. Thus, I couldn’t do everything exactly the same as how we learned them in class, but it was very easy to find the equivalent actions to take in CS6. The reason I had to use this version is because Photoshop CC does not show the image i’m working on, and I think this is because of my visual drivers being out of date. However, I just have not had the time to try to update, so I made do with CS6 instead for the time being. I plan to update my drivers once I am completely finished with this project.

Here is a pastebin containing links to all of the pictures I used, along with the CC license. Each one of them came from Pexels.com.

Graphic Design Project Draft

For this project, I decided to make an animal shelter awareness poster to fit in with the theme of “Animal Rescue”. However, I left off a logo or name for a real shelter because I don’t have the express permission to actually use it legally.

As for design principles and research I did that inspired this poster, I actually didn’t do much research of other similar posters. I did a search, but everything looked basically the same, and I already had came up with an idea I wanted to use before I even did any research. When thinking of what I should do for my poster, I figured I should look at animal stock photos, and found the picture of the grayscale dog. I thought it looked like him thinking about something, and came up with the idea of him imaging having a good life outside of a shelter.

In creating this picture, I started with the grayscale dog’s original picture, which is this:

First thing I did was increase the size of the canvas upwards to 1000, making the poster have equal width and height. With this extra size, I filled in the blank spaces and then cut out the dog from the background, zooming in to edit some errant pixels. Afterwards, I messed with the hue and saturation and the brightness and contrast, applying them to the dog only through a clipping mask. Then I started adding in the other pictures. I placed them behind the dog but above the background, and edited their hue and saturation along with their Brightness/Contrast, a separate mask for each picture. Once I had them how I liked, I lined then up as well as I could and then added a blur, along with blurring the outside lines to make them softer. Lastly, I added in the text.

In looking for the pictures, I went to Pexels.com and found each picture through searching for Golden Retrievers, the most popular kind of dog in america. I’m not entirely satisfied with the pictures I found however, as they don’t look similar enough for my liking. Hopefully, I could find better fitting dog pictures in the future.

As for technical problems, I am currently having problems getting photoshop to actually show me the pictures i’m working on! Because of that, I have to use my old version, Photoshop CS6. However, most things work the same as modern photoshop. I was just lucky to already own an old version of photoshop.

Each picture’s link:

https://www.pexels.com/photo/animal-dog-pet-labrador-8700/ CC0 License.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/animal-beach-clouds-dog-313979/ CC0 License.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-dog-sleeping-on-brown-wooden-surface-144640/ CC0 License.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/garden-yellow-animal-happy-80968/ CC0 License.

Unit One: Project Image Collection

My idea for this project is simply creating a poster that advertises the need for adopting from animal shelters, by using images of some different but similar looking dogs. I plan on tweaking the colors to get them as close as possible, to make it look like the images are all the same dog. Thus making it look like the dog is having a good life after being adopted. Here is a pastebin link with proof of where I got my images/allowance of use, to save space. The images i’m thinking about using are as follows:

The Topic Of This Blog: Animal Rescue

The topic of this blog is my future aspiration, one that I share with my wife. We both want to create an animal rescue together. Although I am currently in line for a degree in Advertising, I am planning on getting a minor in business and plan to use my degree to help earn money that we can use to create this animal rescue, while my wife plans on getting a degree in pre-vet, before going to vet school. We chose this path because of our love of all different kinds of animals, a love that makes us want to help take care and rehabilitate animals, along with provide education for people about how to properly interact with those animals.

We plan to obtain video, audio, and other media materials through interacting with the various different kinds of animal shelters and rescues in Eastern Washington and Idaho. We already are fairly active with various different animal groups and surely can find some rescues, shelters, etc, that would be willing to allow us to take pictures and video, and possibly interview them.

As for ideas on the future projects, I already have a few tentative ones. For the first project, I could possibly put together a poster advertising local shelters and or animal welfare events. For the audio project, I could try to interview the heads of local and nearby animal shelters/animal stores/rescue groups. Lastly, for the video project, I could put together a video advertising a local shelter or rescue, possibly tying it to an event if something is going on soon after or before the project is due.

Lastly, for my inspiration file, I don’t have one yet. Thus, these next links are essentially going to be links I found quickly that seem to fit in well enough to my topic but aren’t entirely thought out perfectly.

1.  VetRanch – This is a series of videos showing veterinarians taking care of injured and sick animals. With my wife going into veterinary school herself, we plan on providing care like this to rescued animals.
2.  Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary – A sanctuary for old dogs that uses the internet, mainly facebook, to help support their cause by using people’s love of cute animals to bring attention.
3. Commander Holly – A youtuber who rescues pigeons. She essentially takes care of an animal that most wouldn’t care to think about. She has adopted over 40 birds since she started, giving them a home.